The lawyers of sanctioned tycoon Alisher Usmanov sent a letter seen by IntelliNews to the EC leadership calling on sanctions to be lifted after thousands of media reports that were used as the basis for imposing the sanctions have since been deemed erroneous and deleted.

Dated August 14 and addressed to Ursula von der Leyen, António Costa, Kaja Kallas, Micheál Martin and Council legal counsel Emer Finnegan, the letter comes from the London-based Omnia Strategy LLP and was filed on behalf of the Russian-Uzbek billionaire Usmanov. Cherie Blair KC, the firm’s chair and wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is among the co-signatories.

“The Council’s reasons and evidence for Mr Usmanov’s designation are derived from mass media and social media publications,” the letter states. “If that is the case, then the overwhelming refutation and deletion of the same statements in the mass media must be accepted as exculpatory evidence.”

The numbers behind that claim are striking. Between 2022 and 2026, the letter says, more than 3,235 publications across 60 countries – including all 27 EU member states, the U.S. and the U.K. – have been corrected to remove untrue statements about Usmanov. These include corrections in prominent news outlets ranging from The New York Times and Reuters to Financial Times, Forbes, Corriere della Sera, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bild and Die Welt. More than 1,300 publications were deleted outright.

In addition, almost a hundred cease-and-desist declarations were signed by journalists in 22 countries, and over 58,000 fake sites and ads were pulled down – many of which, the letter notes, “relied on the Council’s narrative.” The latter include various allegations against Usmanov regarding supposed proximity to the Kremlin, control over businesses and curtailment of freedom of speech at Kommersant.       

Usmanov’s lawyers stress that 20 judgments and injunctions from EU national courts – against Forbes, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Bild, among others – found the underlying statements untrue or unsupported. That, the letter argues, is the “independent verification” the Council has long said it cannot perform itself. “To sum up, the allegations used to maintain Mr Usmanov’s designation have been discredited and refuted in 27 out of 27 EU Member States,” the letter concludes.

The submission then walks through the European External Action Service’s “evidence packs” file by file. At least 18 source items have been challenged or no longer exist; two packs have vanished entirely.

Usmanov has become one of the most persistent challengers of the EU’s restrictive measures. He has filed repeated delisting appeals with the bloc’s justice system. To date, however, none of those has succeeded: the EU court dismissed his initial application for annulment in February 2024 and rejected a fresh challenge in September 2025, ruling that the Council had assembled a sufficiently “specific, precise and consistent” body of evidence – largely from open sources – to keep him listed.

His lawyers’ letter to the EU reopens the debate on the discredited value of that evidence.

The submission also lands at a moment of expansion. With its 21st package adopted in July, the EU pushed the number of designations tied to the war in Ukraine to almost 3,000. Furthermore, Brussels is preparing what officials describe as one of the most far-reaching rounds yet, with some 1,600 further listings under discussion. But as the perimeter widens, so does the scrutiny of how quickly dossiers are assembled: a September 2023 Politico investigation documented misspellings, misidentified nationalities and thinly sourced allegations in the confidential “evidence packs.” Since then, several listings have been annulled – including that of Viatcheslav Kantor – while others, for instance, those of Nikita Mazepin and Maya Tokareva, were quashed for relying on nothing more than family ties.